


Buddies

by Fluffyllama (Llama)



Category: Numb3rs
Genre: Incest, M/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-19
Updated: 2011-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-27 13:00:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/296125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Llama/pseuds/Fluffyllama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charlie is suspicious and tests a hypothesis.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Buddies

“At least I don’t have to ask if you slept with him.”

Charlie could tell from the almost imperceptible flinch that Don hadn’t heard him come into the kitchen.

Don flipped a cold bottle of beer into his hand and let the door swing shut. “What do you mean?”

“Cooper.” Charlie shrugged. He rubbed his fingers across his forehead, feeling the familiar furrow between his brows. “You know, I can tell there’s something…” He let his fingers drop away. “Do you regret coming home?”

“No!” Don’s answer was too quick, too automatic. He didn’t even give it a second’s thought, Charlie could see. All the same, when he looked up to meet Charlie’s gaze he sighed. He opened the beer and took a long drink.

Charlie waited.

“No, I really don’t.”

“But there’s something. And if it was a woman, I’d wonder–”

“Well, he’s not.”

“I noticed.”

Charlie wanted to say more, but Don already had that look. The look on his face that said ‘Wasting valuable FBI time here, Charlie’; the set of his shoulders that said just as clearly ‘I’m outta here’; the twist of his head that meant he was already evaluating escape routes. He had seconds left to get his point across.

“I just wondered…” Charlie started, but too slow. Don had picked his favourite exit and was already making his move for the back door.

“Well, don’t,” Don said, and he was gone.

* * *

Seven o’clock the next evening, eight o’clock even, and still there was no car pulling up outside, no rattle of keys, no jacket slung over the chair. Nobody stealing slices of cheese from the counter when Dad’s back was turned.

“You seen Don?” Charlie hovered over the table, adjusting the place settings. There were three. Right. That was okay.

 _One, two, three…_

“Today? No.” Alan dropped the bread basket on the table and retreated.

 _… four_. Four bread rolls? That didn’t work. Charlie slid into a chair and picked his fork up again, twisting it in his fingers.

“I thought he might be round tonight. You invited him for dinner, didn’t you?”

“Not specifically.”

“Not specifically. Right.” The fork slipped in Charlie’s grip, and he only narrowly avoided scraping an ugly line across the tabletop. “Why not?”

“He’ll come around when he’s stopped sulking.”

“Sulking? He’s sulking? Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?”

“Leave it alone, Charlie,” Alan said, and try as he might, Charlie could get nothing more out of him.

* * *

Don didn’t turn up for dinner the next evening either. He didn’t even seem particularly pleased when Charlie took beer and chips round to his place on a non-baseball night.

“I thought you mathematicians liked your schedules,” was all he said, but he held the door open just the same.

Football was far less interesting statistically than baseball. Or maybe Charlie just didn’t care about it because Don never played. Don didn’t even watch much, but you’d never guess from the way his eyes followed the ball tonight, only interrupted by brief glances of surprise when Charlie took a beer for himself. Charlie contented himself with watching Don from the other end of the couch.

At least until it was time to test his hypothesis.

“A guy invited me to jerk off with him once, you know?”

It wasn’t a surprise when Don choked on his beer.

“Charlie!”

“Of course, I didn’t know that’s what he was saying at the time. Not until he invited me over to watch the game, told me this story about showing his girlfriend a good time and whipped his dick out over the chips and dip.”

And boy, had Charlie _never_ thought about sharing that story with anyone before. He shook his head and grabbed the bag of chips off Don.

Shame there was no dip.

“There a point to this story?” Don’s eyes were firmly back on the screen now, as if he was paying attention.

 _“Johnson goes back for the pass, back, back…”_

“Just that… I realised I’d missed the signs, you know? The look.”

“The look.”

 _“…he’s got Lester open downfield…_

“Yeah.” Charlie took a deep breath. “The same look Cooper was giving you the other day.”

 _“There’s the pass…it’s long, it’s long…OH, what a reception! Truly, Bob, he’s one of the best wide receivers in the game.”_

Don flipped channels, muttering something about there had to be baseball on somewhere.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Like even baseball would stop Charlie going after this one.

“Maybe, maybe not.”

Don gave up searching and settled for the football again.

“Not, Charlie. Really not. No maybe about it.”

“Right.” Charlie licked salt off his fingers and pretended he wasn’t watching Don out of the corner of his eye. “I’ll just ask Dad then, shall I?”

“Dad doesn’t know anything.” Don crumpled his beer can with one hand and aimed it at the bin before reaching for another. “He just didn’t like me staying away for days at a time, spending nights in motels and rooftops and god knows where else.”

“With Cooper.”

“Yes, with Cooper. It was part of the job.”

“So all the nights you spent in motels were just for work?”

“Yeah, you know, Charlie?” Don turned to him, and although Charlie couldn’t work out if it was anger or just exasperation, flushed and flustered was a good look on his big brother. “Don’t look at me like that, you know what it’s like. Staying in motels in that job…”

Charlie opened his mouth to interrupt, but Don waved a hand in one of those incomprehensible gestures that only made sense after your fourth beer, and Charlie closed it again with a smile. “…it’s not all head down and go to sleep, or share a bottle of J.D. and talk about conquests, you know. It’s not like the… the movies, or whatever’s in that head of yours.”

“No?”

“No.” Don had no idea what was in Charlie’s head, that was for sure. “On those trips, you take it in turns to sleep if either of you get any, in case your target turns up, or does a moonlight flit, or something. Nobody would get chance to try anything like that, even if they wanted to. Not when they’re there to do a job.”

“I see.” Charlie sucked thoughtfully on the tip of one still-salty finger and let himself slide back into the depths of the couch.

“Good. I’m glad you get it.” Don followed suit, his fingers relaxing their grip on the beer he was nursing. He turned back to the TV and the game. “What’s the score?”

Charlie laughed. “I have no idea.”

“Damnit, where’s the–” Don fiddled with the remote again, but apparently there wasn’t even a repeat of a baseball game to be found.

“Didn’t you have to travel a long way on some of those trips?”

Don jabbed at the remote and grimaced. “Sometimes.”

“And when you caught the guy, you’d hand him over before coming home?”

“Usually.” Don shifted on his end of the couch and rubbed a hand over his eyes. “Look, Charlie, if there’s something you want to know, just… get it over with, okay?”

Charlie wasn’t going to be rushed into this one again, though.

“It’s just… there had to be times where you had a long trip home and couldn’t make it in one day, right? Where you had to stay overnight some place with just some redneck bar to drink in, if you were lucky.”

Don didn’t say a word, apparently focused completely on the game, but his fingers twitched on the remote and unless Charlie was imagining it, the volume lowered a fraction.

“I mean, that had to happen sometimes. And you hate those kind of places, so you’d maybe get a few beers and take them back to your room instead.” Charlie laughed, and shifted his legs under him so he was sitting a little closer to Don. “I bet Cooper can drink you under the table.”

Don’s mouth crinkled into an unwilling grin, just for a moment. “Yeah, you can say that again.”

Charlie smiled and continued his train of thought. “And maybe it’s been a really hard couple of weeks, hot on the trail of some guy, and at last you can relax. So maybe you drink a little liquor when the beer’s gone, and there’s nothing on TV–”

“You kidding me?” Don raised an eyebrow, even though he still wasn’t looking at Charlie. “Coop always picked motels with sports, porn, or both. Golden rule, on the job or not.”

“Yes, exactly!” Charlie exclaimed, as if he’d known all along. It was even better than he’d hoped. “Couple of tired, unattached guys, beer and liquor, good sports or bad porn, and the come down from weeks of adrenaline… it would be more surprising if _nothing_ ever happened one of those nights.”

Don tipped his beer up again, still avoiding Charlie’s eye. “You think?”

“Yeah.” Charlie took another sip of his own beer in case it tasted better after a few mouthfuls – no, the stuff was still vile, but he choked it down anyway – and considered his next move.

Don beat him to it. That didn’t happen too often; maybe he could blame the alcohol.

“And you wouldn’t have a problem with that?”

“A problem with–” It took Charlie a moment to work out what Don meant. “No! No problem at all. Hey, chip’n'dip guy, remember?” He nudged Don with his elbow and grinned.

Don spluttered a mouthful of beer over his jeans before he managed to speak. “You _went_ for that? Jeez, Charlie.”

Charlie shrugged. He was almost sure the warmth in his cheeks was from the beer. Almost.

“I figure you have to try everything once, right?”

“Yeah. Once.”

“Or, or maybe more than once.” Charlie could have bitten his tongue for that careless remark, because Don was sitting up straighter now, and he’d been so close to reaching out then, and now he’d probably screwed it all up. “More than once is good, you know. If you have the chance.” He held his breath while Don examined his beer can more closely than seemed truly necessary.

“Buddies like that don’t grow on trees, Charlie,” Don said, and if that wasn’t just a little regret in his voice then Charlie didn’t know what it was.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Charlie kept his voice low, and if he wasn’t mistaken Don lowered the TV volume even further to catch his words. “Sometimes you find them in the most unexpected places.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Chip’n'dip guy was my study partner. I should’ve known something was up when he invited me over when we had no homework. But, you know, I didn’t have a lot of friends, and–”

Charlie stopped, trying to find the right words. Don’s arm was tense, just a tiny nudge away from his own, and his breathing shallow as he listened. His skin had a rosy tinge, a gleam of perspiration, and Charlie had to swallow hard to concentrate on his train of thought.

“And when he said he had to take his pants off, I still didn’t catch on.” Charlie smiled, and he could see Don’s mouth twitch as well. “Yeah, you can laugh, but I just thought he was uncomfortable like he said. Then suddenly his dick was in his hand and he was all, ‘Hey dude, I do this with my buddies all the time, don’t you?’”

“And of course you said yes.” Don was shaking his head now, whether at the story or just Charlie’s innocence, Charlie wasn’t sure.

“Hey, maybe it was true.” But Charlie hadn’t been sure of that for a long time now. “He was pretty good at it. Taught me a lot. And, you know. There were others.” He looked up, but Don didn’t seem too bothered by that either.

“Charlie.” This time Charlie was pretty sure it was him Don was shaking his head at. “If you wanted to know stuff you could’ve come to me, buddy.”

“Really?”

Don was silent for a moment, then he sighed before he spoke. “Maybe not then, no.” He tugged Charlie closer to him and into a one-armed but enthusiastic hug. “But we’re good now, aren’t we? Hey?”

“Yeah, Don.” Charlie let himself slide further against Don, his hand slipping down to one jeans-clad knee. He let his fingers run over the awkward edge of bone, and squeeze into the muscle. “We’re good now.”

Maybe better than he thought, because even as his hand edged its way higher on Don’s thigh, he could feel Don’s breath hot against his ear, his neck. A brush of stubble followed it, softly harsh like the fingers that dug into his shoulder, like the subtle shift of weight against him that meant Don was leaning in; like the sudden pressure of fingers on his zipper.

“You sure we’re good, buddy?” Don’s voice was breathy and shaken as he pressed his lips against Charlie’s jaw, and the undercurrent buzzing beneath was one Charlie had never heard before. He tried to draw a breath, but the burst of Don-scent in his mouth, his nose, was too much and he just gasped and pressed down on Don’s hand as an answer instead.

That was enough, it seemed, because one quick tug later Charlie was falling, falling backwards and there was Don pushing him down with that grin on his face and that intense, intent look in his eye that said he meant business, and the remote was sliding, sliding, had slid off them and thumped onto the floor with a sudden flare of sound.

 _“Allenson goes back for the punt…OH! It’s a fake!”_

Don’s hand had made short work of zipper and pants and Charlie had no idea how, but he decided it really didn’t matter as long as he didn’t miss any of this part, the part where Don’s palm was rough and warm against his dick, the part where it was slick where it took a detour over the head, the part where his fingers wrapped around it and seemed to know just what Charlie needed.

 _“He’s got the wide-out in the end zone and nails the pass…TOUCHDOWN!”_

“Wait, wait,” Charlie gasped, because if he didn’t it was going to be too late, and damnit, the one time he knew what he wanted he was going to get it. He prodded Don far enough aside to reach for his belt, and worked it open, attacking Don’s jeans and pushing them down until the buttons were clinking against his own, and god bare skin on bare skin felt good, so good Charlie didn’t even care that Don’s thrusts against him were going to leave him rubbed raw and probably even bruised, he just wanted more. More of this, more of Don, more of everything, and he thought he even panted that out… until sensory overload took him over the edge and he closed his eyes as wet heat spilled between them, waiting for Don to grunt and follow him into oblivion, which he did a few moments later.

 _“Yes, Bob, truly one of the better fake punts I’ve seen this year. Great call by Coach Charles!”_

“Still good?” Don managed, before he buried his face in Charlie’s neck again, and Charlie held him more tightly and laughed. Because even if it was going to be awkward for a few moments, or even if they couldn’t talk about it for a while, one thing was for sure. This was no chip’n'dip guy, no Coop, no anybody else.

Him and Don, they were always going to be buddies.


End file.
